P7000 firmware 1.1 - how fast is it?

One of the major problems with Nikon's P7000 is that it's slow. In some cases, really slow - taking up to 30 seconds to write a 5-shot burst of bracketed images, during which time the camera is completely unresponsive.

So, how much does the latest 1.1 firmware upgrade improve this? We decided to find out.

We set up a P7000 to shoot in shutter priority mode, but with the lens covered to force a completely black image. The SD card used was a 16GB Transcend Class 6 SDHC, formatted in-camera. Single-image write times for JPEG Large Fine, NRW, and NRW+JPEG were taken and averaged across multiple shots, and the same was done for a burst of 5 images in each mode.

The results show a definite improvement - a burst of five NRW files taking 30% less time, for example.

But, is this fast enough? We still think that the "Expeed C2" powering the P7000 is just not up to the job of delivering fast write times. It's a near-fatal flaw in an otherwise superb camera, but it's encouraging to see Nikon attempting to address the issue.

UPDATE: Compared to Canon G12:

I don't have a lot to add, that chart says it all - the Canon still romps home with this one.

UPDATE 2: With a Class 10 SDHC card:

Following some reports that people are seeing far quicker write times, we tried again with a faster (Class 10) SD card - a Transcend 16Gb Class 10 SDHC. Note that these results are from the first press of the shutter button, to when the "busy" indicator stops flashing and the camera becomes responsive again.

A slight improvement, but not a huge one. Still, we'd recommend a Class 10 SD card where possible.

Please, redo your tests with a normal SD card and find out that the real writing times are significantly better than what you state.
Writing time of a fine JPEG is hardly noticible. Writing time of a bracketed burst of 5 pictures and with a shutter speed of 1/2 s per picture takes with my P7000 less than 9 s.
Kind regards, Ernst

I just tried BKT, 5 pictures in NRW format. The result was approximately 11 s overall. Seeing the bad messages, I did not believe this and did another trial. The result was about the same, approx. 11 s.
My timing is not quite accurate, I simply counted twenty-one, and so on.

A point that is not addressed until now is the difference in file magnitude. Looking at the magnitude of the files in the DPReview test one can observe a significant difference. I assume that larger files take a larger writing time.
And, what puzzles me, does the larger files result in a better picture quality?

I did the test with my P7000. The memory card is Sandisk Extreme III 30 MB/s. I took the time using a stopwatch. Camera was set to shutter priority mode, shutter speed 1/2 sec. JPEGs were FINE quality.

The time was measured from the pressing the shutter (pre-focused) till the end of the flashing of the autofocus lamp.

Single RAW+JPEG was clearly faster than in the test of the above article. I repeated the test with the same result.

In general, my P7000 feels more snappy in shooting—especially in burst mode—than before the firmware update. It could be faster, though.

In the end it is the image quality that matters to me. Here is a shot I took hand held in street light—ISO 400, shutter speed 5/37 s. I did little noise reduction and perspective correction to it. The white balance and exposure were virtually untouched. It was saved as JPG (no down sampling) at quality 11 in Photoshop Elements 9. P7000 did excellent metering job again!:

I do it faster I guess with Nikon d5000, i am disappointed about slowness serials burst nikon d7000, just as my sister said, you have to take next model thereafther. Suppose this is child-sickness of model d7000. it had first been repaired before putting this model on market! What a pity. I had so hoiped buying this summer this model until i did read this slowness-item.now i am going to buy 2nd nikon d5000 if needed. cheaper and faster and with light sensitive lens nothing goes wrong with it. and with new sd 45 in stead of old 30.../sec writing i suppose perhaps 4 frames sec. rate could be perhaps 4,5 a second... sometimes putting out Noise reduciton can do wonders...

"I do it faster I guess with Nikon d5000, i am disappointed about slowness serials burst nikon d7000, just as my sister said, you have to take next model thereafther. Suppose this is child-sickness of model d7000. it had first been repaired before putting this model on market! What a pity. I had so hoiped buying this summer this model until i did read this slowness-item.now i am going to buy 2nd nikon d5000 if needed. cheaper and faster and with light sensitive lens nothing goes wrong with it. and with new sd 45 in stead of old 30.../sec writing i suppose perhaps 4 frames sec. rate could be perhaps 4,5 a second... sometimes putting out Noise reduciton can do wonders..."

I had a D5000 and now I have a D90. D5000 is a great camera—fast with great IQ. Anyhow, D90 is better in everything—it is faster, more responsive, has fantastic LCD, for example. My brother got a D7000 and it is clearly faster in continuos shooting and has better IQ in high ISO but is a bit slower in AF and general operation than my D90. As you said, there must be something wrong with that particular D7000—it should shine over D90 in continuos shooting.

I just ordered a Sandisk Extreme Pro 45 MB/s SD card to see if I can improve my D90's performance. I expect to see buffer clearing times getting shorter. I'm not sure if the continuos shooting speeds will increase, though. I think the same applies also to D5000 which like D90 isn't made to support new faster UHS-1 protocol that the 45 MB/s Sandisk SD card uses.

I'll try to find time to do some tests next week when I get the new 45 MB/s card to see its performs on D90 vs. my current Extreme III 30 MB/s one.

Turning the "Zoom in on active focus point" in the image review significantly slows down the camera.

I just bought a p7000 and it felt great in the store. When I took it out on the first shoot with it, it was suddenly intolerably slow. I played around with the settings and it turns out this is the problem. Before my write/freeze times were around 5-6 seconds now they feel more like 2-3 seconds with a class 4.

The setting you want to avoid is in Settings... Monitor Settings... Image Review... "Zoom in on active focus point". Turning image review off completely shaved off another half second or second.

Since the image review is not very high-res, hopefully this means they can further improve the times in another firmware update.